Brick ****

Writer/Director: Rian Johnson

Year: 2005

Cinematographer: Steve Yedlin

Rian Johnson does two things at once in this movie: first, he shows his knowledge of the detective genre by using many Film Noir tropes, and weaves the complicated plot full of femme fatals, shady drug dealers and their unpredictable muscle for hire, a murder mystery being solved by the wounded loner investigator who suffers from a broken heart and mistrust of women.

But the second thing Johnson is doing is portraying the world of the modern wealthy high school full of kids who think they are something that they can't be because they lack the life experience to be who they think they are, though they are smart and talented. He captures that heightened reality of emotions that high school is full of, but instead of making the kids out to be melodramatic for no reason... he goes with it, in fact he justifies the drama by giving them this murder mystery entwined with drugs and sexual betrayal. But not just the realistic drug and sex and violence problems that a contemporary high schooler might encounter, but heightened all the way up to Film Noir levels of melodrama, complete with the witty, fast-talking dialogue.

You've got to roll with that artistic decision, to put high schoolers in a Film Noir, or else it will just annoy you. He manages to let the film be funny at times, with moments of absurdity showing up where we might expect for their to be holes in the plans of a pampered high school kid from a wealthy southern california community trying to play detective or drug kingpin... but ultimately he takes the story seriously, and the final body count adds up to 6.

It's an interesting idea, and I think you certainly can find high schools in the US with these dynamics at play, but it doesn't mean it's easy to follow a hard-boiled down-and-out detective who's only what? 17-years-old? Of course, in the eyes of a 17-year-old, he may think of himself as hard-boiled because he still has no clue of how much more hard stuff life has got waiting for him... then again, the story justifies the kid's feelings by taking away the "love of his life"... certainly something a 17 year old would feel for his first ex-girlfriend with all the over-passionate melodrama of young love.

So in the end I'm torn, the movie works on some level, if you take it as an interesting exercise in taking both the real and imagined drama of high school, and further heightening the stakes to Film Noir levels... but if it just seems ridiculous to hear such witty, encoded dialogue coming from kids this age, then you'll be further distracted by the moments when the acting doesn't deliver the lines with the gravity that an adult actor can bring, for example, when Joseph Gordon-Levitt says, "oh put that body to bed..." A line that just rang in my head as a sour note, annoying me for the entire film because it was delivered like a kid doing an impression of Jack Nicholson in Chinatown... but maybe that's who that character is... a kid who has read one too many Dick Tracy stories, but then again, if the character is doing impression of film noir (and it's plausible that a kid in Southern California knows about film noir) then why is there no reference to that? And why do all the other characters seem to be in the role play too?

No, I guess Johnson wasn't really trying to get at the idea of young kids playing out filmic fantasies... I think the filmic fantasy is a personal one for Johnson. Judging by his other work, The Brothers Bloom, I'd say thats a safe bet. Both films have young kids playing out genre film plots that are beyond realistic... I think it's Rian who is such a film geek that maybe he always played pretend as a kid that he was living out the plot of a con man or hard-boiled detective from the movies, and its Johnson who's thorough understanding of genre tropes allows him to methodically include them in the very stories his characters are role-playing in.

It falls emotionally flat for me, I would rather see a straight con or detective film rather than see young characters trying to be the stereotypes of con men or detectives that those same characters might have seen in the movies that Rian Johnson has been watching.

So for falling emotionally flat and a few poorly delivered lines, it can't get 5 stars, but it is very original and interesting, and the writing/directing deserve credit for being outside of the box in a good way... so yeah, go see it.